Reluctant Treasures

This book is about the complexities of psychoanalytic practice. It aims to instruct students and practitioners in the ambiguities and contradictions that make analytic work difficult - if not infuriatingly difficult - and, at the very same time, an activity of consuming interest. Freud's position was clear. Patients present themselves to us in particular ways and, in our curiously skeptical analytic manner, we realize that they firmly reside in an inflexibly preferred psychological world. That world cunningly denies any other world. Every other reality is thereby rendered impossible and nonexistent - in other words, is repressed. In the language of Wittgenstein, the "states of affairs" that the patient announces to us are his vehemently adhered to and precious realities, and all other states of affairs are denied any existence or plausibility. Psychoanalytic theory is at great pains to deny this and to assert that every reality is both relevant and arbitrary, both understandable and refutable. With this as background, Dr. Warme spells out the oddly ambiguous technical consequences of the psychoanalytic position. Covering such issues as interpretation, transference and countertransference, and the idea of change, this book will appeal to anyone who practices analysis or analytically based psychotherapy.